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Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay began there was no distinct coastline, but a messy, tattered mix of marsh and mangrove and rivers and bays as if the land at the tip of Florida was unraveling like an old wool scarf.
    â€œWhat’s the idea? Use this as a nautical chart?”
    She winked a yes.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œKeep looking, Thorn. Viewing the Glades from the sky, things pop out you wouldn’t notice at water level.”
    It took me another minute before I saw what she was hinting at.
    Dotting the northern edge of the photo was a series of small lakes and ponds, each lake rimmed by mangroves. From a passing skiff they would be hidden from view, and I was certain they weren’t noted on any of the nautical charts I’d used over the years. Most charts weren’t updated for decades, and in the back corners of the constantly changing Everglades, they were virtually worthless. I’d been poking around the Glades all of my life, but I’d never guessed that just behind this or that screen of mangroves were so many lakes.
    â€œSo tell me, Thorn, you still don’t want that job?”
    â€œYou’re a wily woman, Rusty Stabler.”
    â€œMight require making a few illegal snips in the man-groves. Doing that in a National Park, you could get a hefty fine.”
    â€œStill not interested. But I have a good pair of loppers I can loan you.”
    She groaned and pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down.
    After two decades of guiding, she’d managed to put aside enough cash to finance the engineering blueprints for a shallow-draft houseboat of her own design. Then she’d taken the blueprints along with her detailed business plan and laid them before a couple of local attorneys who’d scored millions in real estate.
    As luck would have it, Rusty’s business model meshed with some obscure tax need of theirs, as well as providing them an excellent venue to entertain clients, so they’d written some hefty checks and given Rusty free reign to have the ship custom built. Somewhere between half a million and a million bucks. A two-story, sixty-five-foot, multiton house-boat that drew only twenty-eight inches of water and could reach areas deep into the Everglades far beyond the zones where conventional houseboats would run aground.
    The idea was to tow two skiffs behind the houseboat and anchor up as close as she could get to the shallow-water fishing grounds. With a base so far out, there’d be no need to make the long run from the Everglades National Park docks at Flamingo and back again at sunset. That would add several hours to every day of fishing. She could take her time. Use the skiffs to penetrate deep into the backcountry, fish full days, then zip back to the houseboat to indulge in five-star dinners and sleep in air-conditioned comfort. Luxury camping for the well-heeled adventurer. Work the Ever-glades in the winter when the mosquitoes were hibernating, and in summers do weeklong stretches in the Marquesas.
    To make the operation work, Rusty needed a partner who was a reliable handyman and fishing guide and had patience enough to free snagged lures from the mangrove branches for bumbling amateur anglers.
    I seriously doubted the patience part, but I hadn’t met many machines nautical or otherwise I couldn’t jigger into working order, and I’d fished the Glades since I was a kid and knew every creek and tributary from Flamingo at the southern tip all the way north until the navigable rivers ended, and the marsh became impenetrable to anything but kayaks and airboats.
    â€œIt’s a hell of a photograph,” I said. “But these mangroves surrounding the lakes are so thick, it might take weeks to hack through them.”
    Rusty leaned forward and put her finger on a spot on the photo.
    â€œWhat do you see?”
    Where she was pointing there was a single faint V in the outer rim of the mangroves that surrounded a large oblong lake. At the point of